“I Was Looking for God”

Wehrmacht Personnel and Their Personal Relationships with Religion

By: Christopher Bishop, Texas A&M University

The Wehrmacht comprised the German armed forces between 1935 and 1945. It comprised the army (Heer), navy (Kriegsmarine), and air force (Luftwaffe). In total, the Wehrmacht was able to muster 18 million men to serve on behalf of the Third Reich over the course of the Second World War (1939-1945). These men carried with them a variety of different worldviews. These worldviews were in flux throughout their lives as they encountered and engaged with the world around them. There were both people and ideas they believed to be superior to themselves, and people and ideas they believed to be inferior in relation to themselves. These men, ranging from 16 to 60 years old, brought all sorts of baggage, thoughts, and convictions to their various professional military education courses, systems of military education that adhered to Nazi ideological tenets for the purposes of indoctrination. Therefore, these men were profoundly impressionable, and groomed for a war of ideological annihilation and expansion. The home front supported them and their attempts to confront their struggles with emotional composure in the face of adversity and their sense of duty to their country and supreme commander, Adolf Hitler. Atrocities were committed in the name of this cause, but to what extent a grasp of Nazi policy and high politics influenced this remains a point of fierce debate in the historiography surrounding this organization. As far as religion itself is concerned, a community of scholarship continues to further develop the historiography on the Wehrmacht and religion, particularly the chaplaincy and its service to the combat arms.[1] Rolf-Dieter Müller suggests in Hitler’s Wehrmacht: 1939-1945 that Hitler, recognizing the “contradiction” between what was ultimately Nazism’s general opposition towards Christianity and the German nation’s roots in Christianity “put the brakes” on Nazi religious reform and Germany’s numerous, albeit declining, church affiliations in both civilian life and the military.[2]

Müller also points out that “in principle … calling on a higher power competed with the Führer’s claim of absolute dominance … Instead of a religion, National Socialism was to become a Weltanschauung, or worldview. In place of the fatherland, nation and race now took center stage.” Müller concludes that Hitler harbored hostility towards religious conservatism within the Wehrmacht. Hitler made this clear in his “war of worldviews and race” speech in February 1939. The Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany were subjected to accusations of high crime if they breached the social, cultural, or political policies of the Third Reich with any “reference to a higher authority.” In Müller’s estimation, while the connection between Christianity and the German military survived the defeat of 1918, it did not withstand the strain of rearmament and the Wehrmacht’s introduction to the German armed forces in 1935.[3] This paper suggests otherwise. I argue that enlisted men, junior officers, and their loved ones, in many instances, clung to religious ritual to make sense of and justify the world around them in response to the uncertainties and anxieties that a total war in Europe generated. In doing so, the resolve necessary to wage Hitler’s race war was realized.

Berlin, Luthertag, November 19, 1933, photography, Berlin, Germany.

Religion and Christianity are used interchangeably in this article: the Christian faith held historic significance in Germany, and this work takes the liberty of using those terms interchangeably. While the diversity of Christian thought and denominational difference in the German context is noted, the definition of “religiosity” or “Christianity” in this piece is limited to feldpost letters that express, in varying capacities, the Christian trinity in some form, historical moments recognized by the faith, or simple expressions of a divine other. Moreover, this article defines religion as a coping mechanism, a form of identity construction, and an imagined binding agent that Wehrmacht personnel used in their writings to make sense of their realities. Additionally, this work largely considers the writings of Germans. It does not take into consideration the auxiliary, non-German forces that entered the service of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Finally, another point to keep in mind is the significance of holidays: Christmas, Easter, or Pentecost often helped alleviate the pain caused by the drudgery and danger of military service. These celebratory occasions that fostered group identity and camaraderie served to bring soldiers back to the ideological, social, and cultural beliefs that spurred many of them to willingly participate in Hitler’s war of ideological annihilation.

Using feldpost letters, this article reconstructs a case study of the religious viewpoints of German soldiers and how those religious concerns intersected with the broader concerns of their time and place in history. This work contributes to the so-called everyday history (Alltagsgeschichte) literature on Germans during the Second World War. Letters, especially wartime letters of soldiers, do offer methodological challenges to the historian. Wehrmacht letters were subject to censorship by the officer corps. Defeatism and critiques of the government in Berlin were especially monitored by the censorship boards embedded within the Wehrmacht.[4] And while this is a limitation in the reliability of the source material in question, it is easy to place too much confidence in the capabilities of the censors. Over the course of the war, billions of letters were sent between the German military and the Homefront. The censorship community, already quite small, could only screen so many of these letters.[5] Moreover, many within the Wehrmacht held little anxiety over whether their letters might be screened and did not take this governmental policy into account as they constructed narratives for their readers regarding their daily concerns. Self-censorship, however, poses a much more acute concern for the historian.[6]

The carefully curated self-image found in these letters should be one of the foremost methodological concerns for the historian. Many of the letters that German soldiers, writing in many cases to family members,  offered a carefully constructed outlook tinged with optimism for the future, and a stalwart spirit in the face of adversity was often assumed and put on full display for their readers. It would, therefore, be a mistake for any historian to approach these letters as factual representations of the war or the inner conditions of the Wehrmacht warfighter.[7] What these letters do reveal, however, is an exercise in narrative, identity construction, reflection, a pursuit of the valuable or the ideal in a community despite reality, and a way to interpret that reality—in this case, through a simplistic form of autobiography. This methodology is also applied to Guy Sajer’s memoir The Forgotten Soldier: War on the Eastern Front, A True Story. While Sajer’s factual claims about the Eastern Front and his time in the Groβdeutschland Division are debated, the skepticism towards religion found throughout the memoir reveals a narrative choice and identity construction inspired by his time in combat.

The Wehrmacht is all too often understood as a monolithic and ideologically unified organization that relied on two forms of primary motivation: vertical (ideological) motivation and horizontal motivation through comradeship, leadership, or training. This was not entirely the case, though. While there is staunch disagreement among scholars over the rigor of indoctrination in the Wehrmacht, the scholarship demonstrates that Nazis often experienced difficulties in their attempts to unequivocally transform thousands of young, impressionable men and their families into ideal voices for Nazism. Pragmatism and compromise often ruled the day. Ultimately, Christianity proved to be an awkward bedfellow with Nazism in the hearts and minds of many under the banner of the Third Reich.[8]

The Wehrmacht was a community of contradiction. The 4th Panzer Division of Army Group Center, for instance, performed its job well. Cherikov, a town in Soviet Belarus, was cleared of resistance and declared secure in July 1941. The following morning, a Sunday, a young junior officer, Lieutenant (Lt.) Fritz Farnbacher of the 103rd Tank Artillery Regiment sang the following from Psalm 36: “Your loving kindness, O Lord, extends to the heavens, / Your faithfulness reaches the skies.” Not long after, Soviet deserters were brought before Farnbacher and his superior officer, Major Hoffmann. Looking at them with disgust and recalling the bodies of his dead men, Hoffmann requested his “Jew-comforter,” a club mockingly littered with Soviet insignias. Hoffmann bludgeoned one of the Red deserters, thought to be a Soviet political officer, prior to having him shot. While not entirely opposed to the Soviet’s fate, Lt. Farnbacher found the method repulsive on vague notions of morality and religion. In Ukraine, a professing Christian named Captain Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche, prostrated before the SS after the murder of over a thousand Jews at an airbase, refused to obey orders in a demonstration of “common humanity” on behalf of those murdered. Conversely, in a letter to his wife, a German non-commissioned officer, describing the Soviets as the “tools of Judas,” wrote of the necessity for invasion. Brutality and “lofty ideas about the value of human life” needed to be jettisoned in the war against the Soviet state because “that is what God wants.”[9] The writings of many within the Wehrmacht reflected a subconscious ideological compromise with the Nazi regime that is, at times, not adequately dealt with within discourses on the German rank and file of World War II. The ideological juxtapositions not only touched the enlisted personnel of the Wehrmacht, its effects also reached some within the officer corps, as well.

One of the more blatant examples of this ideological contradiction was with regard to church re-openings. As the Wehrmacht gained ground at the outset of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, there were sporadic church re-openings across parts of the axis of advance into Soviet territory. According to Harrisville, these “religious revivals” along the Eastern Front, “were for the most part spontaneous events driven by chaplains, soldiers, and civilians on the ground, usually with little active involvement from military authorities.”[10] While religion was on the decline in parts of the Soviet Union, some Soviets, particularly in Ukraine, saw the religious revival proctored by German enlisted soldiers as a renaissance in the spiritual life of Soviet Ukraine in response to the prevalence of so-called “Soviet atheism.” Indeed, as the Wehrmacht gained ground in Ukraine, one Ukrainian stated, “I never thought, children, that I would live to see the day, but now you see, the Lord had mercy. Pilate’s Empire is coming to an end.” Some soldiers in Ukraine, like Hanz Rahe, reflected upon the German invasion of that country and after conversing with some of his comrades, believed that “the hope grew again in me that in a free Ukraine perhaps Christian preaching would be possible again. This wish is also a goal for me, for which it is worth fighting.”[11] Upon seeing the effects of their small but significant religious revival unfold, some German soldiers felt that their abstract sense of Christian duty in their conquest of the Soviet Union was fulfilled as Orthodox churches opened their doors once more. But this Christian solidarity with emotional communities, stigmatized as enemies of the Third Reich, did not last. Hitler himself ended the church reopenings,  declaring that such actions undermined the true object of the invasion.[12] While the church reopenings did little  in impeding Nazi hegemony in the Soviet Union, they did demonstrate that Nazism did not have an ideological monopoly over the hearts and minds of many within the Wehrmacht.

Indeed, the soldiers’ own correspondence with their loved ones bear out this conflict. PFC Gerhard Richter of the 32nd Infantry Regiment had his mind on Whitsun (Pentecost) while serving on the Eastern Front, “Over Whitsun I will think of you a lot. These are not holidays for me. I will be out on patrol. Walking is nice, but here in Russia it is something different.”[13] Sergeant (Sgt.) Hans Oehler’s Panzer Grenadier regiment was posted along the Donets River in the summer of 1943. Even along the Eastern Front, Oehler wrote of his unit's revelries in celebration of Whitsun to his parents. After chastising his son for disobedience in the letter, he asked his family what their plans were for the day; he encouraged them to “go for a walk in God’s nature.” While Oehler also wrote in the letter that he hoped to forget the celebration that day, the significance of the celebration is without question.[14]

In ttheir letters, a remarkable number of soldiers and their families wrote about Whitsun. Regardless of whether the feelings towards this Christian holiday were rooted in a sincere belief system or cultural ritual, it is telling that so many wrote of this under a regime that was oftentimes hostile to Christianity. Other Christian rituals practiced under the Third Reich included rites of passage for infants. Christian Caspar, an infantryman who served along the Eastern Front, fondly recalled how healthy “Little Wolfgang” became since his christening a birth two years earlier in the summer of 1940.[15] The christening of the child suggests a reliance on the Christian church is to fulfill cultural traditions in some capacity, even in the families of Nazism’s right hand in foreign policy exercise—the Wehrmacht.

Josef Chervatin was an older man who volunteered for army service in October 1941. He was born in 1903 in northern Italy in what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family moved to Oberhausen, Germany before the First World War broke out. In 1927, he married and moved to Ahlen in the Westphalian region of north-western Germany, and he made a living in Germany as a musician prior to his enlistment. He joined the 329th Infantry Division, a unit that played a part in Army Group North’s push towards the Demyansk area of operations along the Eastern Front. The division remained in service until its surrender to Soviet forces in Courland in February 1945. In the spring of 1943, Chervatin wrote to his wife about his son, Hansi, and his “thought processes” regarding “religious affiliation.” He was thankful that his wife brought their son’s concerning thoughts  about the subject of religion to his attention. Diagnosing his son’s thoughts on the divine, he wrote, “I attribute the whole thing to religious education, which is taught incorrectly to children in this regard. I remember when I was his age, I was so fanatical through teaching to believe that anyone not Catholic should go to hell.” Evidently, Chervatin’s religious fanaticism persisted into his final years of schooling when he and his fellow students “got a clergyman for religious instruction.” The clergyman taught Chervatin and his fellow students a kind of religious universalism, a form of coexistence, “anyone, Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan, or whatever else he was, could be blessed and go to heaven if he only firmly believed what his religion told him to believe.”[16]

Chervatin’s worldview, at that point in his life, had changed. “This was a very sensible clergyman,” he told his wife.[17] The German soldier speculated that Hansi had the wrong teacher, and this “caused him to degenerate into aversion,” but he also wondered if his own family was to blame for his son’s waywardness; Chervatin also suggested that his wife’s former Protestant affiliation might have also contributed to their son’s questions. “The sister sins against such harmless children’s minds, and she should be thoroughly enlightened about it … Tell Hansi he should like you even more because you became a Catholic because of him. And then teach him that God is not to be sought in the church alone but is to be found much more outside in nature and everywhere if you open your eyes …I will tell him about it.”[18] The last thing Chervatin wanted to see in his son was religious fanaticism. Despite his universalist leanings, his writings to his wife reveal a respect for, at the very least, the imposing presence that any church imagery might leave on the psyche. In that same year, Chervatin went into detail about a church his unit came across in the Soviet Union. Describing it as “a wonderful church,” it was evident that Soviet forces had occupied the religious space. “They had used the pictures hanging there as targets for pistol shooting and had stabbed the faces of those depicted with knives. It is true what they say about such things. The population is glad they are gone.”[19]

Holidays such as Christmas and Easter were among some of the most significant celebrations in Germany. The narratives surrounding Christ’s life and legacy in the Christian gospels were not at all unfamiliar to Germans. Indeed, songs were sung, and presents from home were opened along the front. The Christmas spirit pierced even the halls of imperial politics. Gina Hirsche, writing to the State Secretary in Krakow, Poland wrote, “I wish you a very merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and when you light the candles on the tree, remember the birth of Jesus Christ and be happy from your heart.”[20] Over the Christmas holidays, Josef Chervatin was often interested to know what the “Christ Child” brought his family. On one occasion, he told his loved ones that once the war ended, he would come home with “a whole sack of presents for you, my dear good wife, and for you, my dear Hansi, from Santa Claus and the Christ Child.” There were several instances in which this historic tradition of the Christ Child’s gift giving was mentioned in Chervatin’s letters home to his family. Other soldiers’ writings, however, demonstrated a far more intimate relationship with the faith that went beyond mere celebrations of traditional holidays or educational anxieties. During the Easter holiday and eager to share his report card with his father Sgt. Franz Wimmer, Erich Wimmer eagerly jotted down his educational progress. What is even more telling, however, is the young boy’s mentioning of the “Easter Resurrection procession” that he and the family planned on attending considering the Easter holiday. Upon learning of his son’s medical emergency back home, Private (Pvt.) Karl Gӧbel wrote, “the boy is like us, the good Lord will look after him, so we will be happy with him. When I watched him sleeping in his pram, what a heavenly feeling it was, to have a child like that.”[21] Despite the distance between soldiers, administrators, and their families, holidays had the potential to unite wartime families and reconnect with a common identity during the war.

Prior to the likelihood of seeing combat, PFC Carl Launinger of the 43rd Pioneer Battalion, at the outset of Operation Barbarossa, expressed his feelings of anxiety to his brother and how he planned to cope with the fog of war:

A hard time for the soldiers in the East has now started, and we do not know what will happen to all of us. We are all making preparations now. The fighting is only 28 kilometers away from us. You will hear it all on the radio, I am not allowed to tell you more for now. The three of us, brothers, we must serve the Fatherland now, and all three not of the youngest age. But we will give our best, as it is our duty. We shall pray to God every day that we are going towards peace.[22]

Hans Caspar, the day Operation Barbarossa began, wrote home to his family informing them of the “great struggle” that was about to begin between the Soviet Union and Germany. Caspar wrote that “with God’s help, we shall defeat this enemy, too, and all four of us will be at the Front.” Caspar continued by asking his brothers to pray for a swift end and to hope for the “very best.” In the letter, he addressed his father, a veteran of the First World War, by telling him that “in this war, we fight along the same fronts that you did in the last war. There will be some hard days ahead of us, but we do it with pride, for our Fatherland, so the enemy stays out of our country.”[23] At the time this letter was written, Caspar was stationed in France, but he understood what the invasion of the Soviet Union meant for himself and his family.

In July 1941, Heinz Küchler wrote home about the general temperament of he and his comrades at the front. He stated that, generally, conversations dwelled on current events and what was ahead for everyone. “No outlook seems promising,” he wrote. “Only fresh individual courage for life will know how to master the future times, in which lying ideals, false gods and untruthful wisdom will and must be smashed … happiness will no longer be allotted to this generation; war will go on for many years, if not centuries!” Küchler hoped that the long and harsh part he would soon play in the unfolding of events in the east would “lead toward truth and knowledge.” A couple of months later, he wrote about death and the existential struggle he believed he needed to face on a personal level. “I understand the endeavors of men to give their death a meaning, in that they conjure for themselves a picture of the soul, of a battle for a great, just, holy cause … My own battle is different … The struggle for the truly human, personal values, for the timeless cause of the spirit, the spirit that creates the tie between man and God, in constant endeavor for knowledge and truth.” According to Küchler, this unique existential fight for what was valuable, this quest for the spirit of truth and a kind of abstract union with God was to be fought not just internally but materially as well.[24]

PFC Kari Walterskirchen not only turned to God in his time of growing fear but also expressed despair at the prospect of a prolonged conflict in continental Europe, “A year ago today I arrived here, and everything is still the same. I have no hope that the war will end anytime soon. I am of the opinion that the war will go on and on for a long time to come. I can hardly believe that there will be a time again where we are together. Please pray for peace and for me and ask God that I am coming home one day. Greetings to all, may God protect you.” The letter reveals not only an indirect plea to a higher power for deliverance from earthly destruction and loneliness but also a complaint. It is a profession of victimhood directed at the conflict itself; a conflict that Walterskirchen was a direct participant of as a member of one of two Flakkorps prepared for the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.[25] The letters in this piece reveal   sincere call for help during one of the most destructive times in human history. But not all agree with this diagnosis.

In his work Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II, Stephen Fritz dismisses religiosity in the Wehrmacht as something “often tinged with arrogant self-pity, betraying anger at what they saw as both their own and Germany’s undeserved fate.”[26] While many of these letters certainly reveal a tone of arrogance and self-pity, Fritz fails to grasp the entire story in his chapter titled, “Withstanding the Strain.” While self-pity is a valid critique of many of the writings, the sensation of self-pity is not necessarily synonymous with fear, worry, or doubt over the future unfolding of events. Late in the war, Gustav Schandler of Panzer Pioneer Battalion 815 expressed an all too human reaction when faced with overwhelming odds:

Our offensive in the West looks very promising, so far. Today, we were able to listen to the Wehrmacht report on the radio, and the main pressure from the Americans has been eliminated. All we want now is the end of the air raids … At last, we can look into the future with some confidence. Next year, Christmas will be celebrated in peace at home. If we all get home in one piece, we will participate in rebuilding our home and country. So, I wish for you … all the very best. God’s blessing.[27]

What this letter demonstrates is a propensity to hope for an escape. “God’s blessing” indicates, regardless of theological sophistication, a religious conscientiousness and hope for all things cherished to be “in one piece” upon the return journey home. While the arrogance rests in Schandler’s failure to grasp the precariousness of the German strategic situation by the end of 1944, historians have the benefit of hindsight, something that Fritz does not readily acknowledge when making his claim about religion in the Wehrmacht. Additionally, while it cannot be gleaned as to whether beliefs in the “Final Victory” flavor the writing, even if it did, clearly, this soldier’s primary concern is a justifiable concern that goes well beyond mere “self-pity,\:” the immediate well-being of himself, his family, and his country despite the devastation around him. The pragmatism and naivete gleaned in the letter juxtapose the understandable anxieties found in the writing; anxieties that the home front felt as well in response to the gathering clouds in the east.

Late in the war, Martha Lötzsch, writing to her husband deployed in Poland, encouraged her husband to stay focused on his duty and to not rely on “city folks [because] they talk a lot, and that is all … these people are not generals.” After referencing a soldier who was missing in action, she closed with “God bless you.” Throughout writing to her husband, Lötzsch continued to call upon God’s blessings for her husband as he performed his duties. The Csala family, writing to Pvt. Gottfried Csala, did nothing but express their hopes that God might save him, “I hope to God that the present winter will stay mild. We can surmise after all the news that Stalingrad is a hopeless matter now. [All] we can do from here is turn to God and pray … we pray for you … God bless you.” Other family writings reflect a similar vein of anxiety in response to the defeat at Stalingrad. Mrs. F. Hannoever wrote to her son, a Feldjäger named PFC Friedrich Hannoever, that she hoped to see “our soldiers get out of Stalingrad.” She prayed for an end to the war, calling upon Hannoever to do the same. In another letter, Mrs. Hannoever wrote of the “God believing” nature of a letter she received from “Jochen.”[28]

The 45th Infantry Division saw action in both European theaters of operation. By December 1941, the division was part of the push to take Moscow. But by the end of the year, the unit was in full retreat as Soviet counter offensives pushed them west. Because the unit was dependent on horse drawn artillery, much of the heavy equipment was abandoned as their means for transportation died off in frigid temperatures. Despite declarations of combat ineffectiveness made by the Chief of the General Staff to Berlin, the unit remained at the Eastern Front into 1942. Sgt. Franz Brunner was an NCO in this division. Upon sending a letter to his comrade, Hans Danner, he was met with expressions of religious jubilation. In the letter, Danner thanked God that he received a letter from Brunner, and aside from speaking of his own personal sense of duty to the home front, suggested to Brunner that they both “pray to God” for Brunner’s health and his return home. Writing to Sgt. Emil Kuenzer, the Kuenzer family wrote, “We think of you all the time during these hard battles, and we put our trust in God and ask him to protect you. One day, the sun will shine for us again.” Kuenzer never received the letter. In the summer of 1944, he was captured by the Red Army and died as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union in September 1944. In Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944, Harrisville astutely notes the “complex picture” that is revealed in the value systems of the Wehrmacht. Nazism infected the ranks and produced “great inroads in the army’s culture.”[29] But many soldiers’ writings often revealed a cry in the wilderness:

I am safe here, and nothing will happen to me. Above my bed there are hanging several religious pictures, which is normal here in Poland. Along the road outside … there is a big stone cross with the figure of Jesus hanging on it. I always stop there for a while and pray for you, and tears come to my eyes. Well, I must not get sentimental too much, life has to go on. I know that you cry everyday … I cry, too … Victory will be ours in the end … I will sit down and write a long letter to you. It will be written with tears … God will help us to overcome.[30]

While this vignette reveals a noticeable level of arrogance regarding the potential for a German victory at this strategic point in the Second World War, the letter also reveals a hopelessness desperately mended by faith in a higher power. The clutches of death also forced religious words out of Wehrmacht personnel. Upon learning of the death of his mother, PFC Caspar held on to his firm conviction that “God has saved her from more pain, [and] she will rest in his arms. May God help us to overcome this war and give our father the strength to carry on.” When a Soviet artillery barrage forced Harry Mielert into the deepest crevices of his fighting hole, he reflected upon the experience saying, “Here and now the Russian artillery fire pushed me into the deepest corner of my foxhole and teaches me the prayer of distress: Lord, have mercy upon us …! The last fatalism, the feeling of being completely in the hands of God and therefore surrendered to his mercy, I still do not have.” During an intense firefight with Soviet infantrymen, Leopold von Thadden-Trieglaff wrote, “I myself dashed forward in order to direct the firefight … I knew that must mean death for me, but God stood next to me.”[31]

As the war in the east dragged on into 1942, many German soldiers, ever increasingly, began witnessing, or partaking in, assaults on prisoners and civilians for varying reasons. Soviet forces could present a stiff resistance to Wehrmacht personnel, even for the smallest of villages. Some captured Soviets set off grenades near their captors, Soviet snipers harassed the German rank and file regularly, and German soldiers sometimes found the mutilated corpses of their own men. This particularly brutal way of war in the Soviet countryside, villages, and cities wreaked psychological and emotional havoc on the men in field gray. On top of an already brutal invasion, the Wehrmacht sanctioned the brutalization and murder of Soviet prisoners of war, Soviet civilians, and the destruction of Soviet villages in their struggle for conquest and counterinsurgency. In the village squares, German soldiers erected gallows for those suspected of partisan activity. The Wehrmacht’s response to guerilla tactics was ruthless. In response to these rapidly deteriorating conditions, Hans Albring opined to a comrade:

Just to be alive still seems like a gift from God, and I don’t just want to give thanks with words if we survive this … and life-eating ogre Russia with all our limbs intact. The sight of bestially mutilated corpses which wear the same uniform as you cuts into your whole mental map of where you are. But also, the staring faces of the hanged. The pits full of the shot … You can never forget it, even if you want to. [It] gives us something instead of the harried creature, of the pitiful, impoverished man. Our path here is strewn with some kind of self-portraits … you find yourself in them. It is just like those who sit by the path of the Gospels, plagued by this and that, until the Savior comes. I have not yet found a poem that encompasses what is happening here, much must remain forever unsaid.[32]

The horrors of war prompted silence in some cases, but Albring still leaned into religious imagery to suggest that hope could be found beyond the death that surrounded him. But others arrived at different conclusions about religiosity and war. Guy Sajer, a Franco-German who served with the Großdeutschland Division along the Eastern Front, wrote of religious experiences and conversations throughout his memoir, The Forgotten Soldier. But Sajer was not a religious man. And his memoir reveals a man who held a muddled relationship with Christianity as a principle or way of life. Nevertheless, his account of his experiences revealed exposures, often traumatic, to religion and a plea to the divine. In one instance, near the Belgorod-Kharkov front in 1942, Sajer recalled a comrade who was shot in the lower jaw after a Soviet air attack on their position was stunted by the Luftwaffe. In a fit of tearful panic, Sajer applied what medical attention he could to the wound his comrade had received that shattered the lower jawbone in the engagement. Making use of a nearby Soviet truck, Sajer moved his wounded friend out of the combat zone to find security and medical assistance. “Choking back my tears, I prayed, without reason or thought, saying anything that came into my head. ‘Save him. Save Ernst, God. He believed in you. Save him. Show yourself.’ But God did not answer my appeals … The man struggled with death, and the adolescent struggled with despair, which is close to death. And God, who watches everything, did nothing.” Sajer begged the heavens to let his friend live through that day, but Ernst did not survive.[33]

A year later in the summer of 1943 near Belgorod, Sajer and his unit successfully assaulted and captured a Soviet position. Not long after, the Germans dug into the Russian soil in preparation for the Soviet counterattack. Luftwaffe fighter-bombers did what they could to neutralize Soviet artillery positions along the Soviet line, but the pilots’ efforts proved inadequate. As the aircraft left the combat area to refit and refuel, Soviet artillery promptly continued its sustained strikes on the German position. When Soviet artillery finally fell silent, Sajer recalled his thoughts: “Nothing remains for those who have survived such an experience but a sense of uncontrollable imbalance, and a sharp, sordid anguish which reaches across the years unblunted and undiminished … Abandoned by a God in whom many of us believed, we lay prostrate in our demi-tomb.”[34] In moments of sheer terror, a Wehrmacht trooper, openly skeptical of religion, within a division known for its war crimes across the war fronts, could not help but wonder if the divine would ever save his life from the metal jaws of artillery shells.[35]

By the autumn of 1943, Sajer’s unit was in full retreat. Sajer and his comrades arrived at the Dnieper River to the north of Crimea where they dug in along the western bank. As days turned into nights, they waited for a Soviet attack. And as the first snows of winter began to settle on the ground, Sajer recalled the inner despair he felt. “We were exhausted, and had no hope of future respite. Where could we find it? How far would we have to withdraw?” Sajer recalled, in vivid detail, the thoughts he had as the temperatures plummeted and as they waited for the enemy. He recalled the difficulties in writing about his experiences and further reflected on what little vertical motivation he could muster in his relationship to the divine, “I know that one can call on all the saints in heaven for help without believing in any God: and it is this that I must describe, even if it means plunging back into a nightmare for nights at a time.”[36] Fear of the unknown or fear of death forced soldiers into a psychological corner. Whether it was out of a gesture of sincerity or scramble born out of desperation, soldiers filled the unknown with coping mechanisms. Indeed, the vast, endless tundra of the Soviet Union alone convinced Sajer that it was “almost necessary to believe in God.”[37]

In the closing months of the war, Sajer wrote a letter home. The letter was rife not with pleas to the divine, but with indifference towards the divine. In his writings to someone named Paula, he no longer expected “anything more from the ordinary world, from which we seem entirely cut off. I read your lines as our comrade Smellens, who is lucky enough to believe in God, recites his prayers. Nothing can help us anymore, Paula.” Sajer compared a prayer life to vodka, suggesting that, like vodka, all a prayer can do is “blunt the cold for a moment.”[38] Sajer’s personal account reveals two immediate things: first, Wehrmacht personnel did not necessarily have to be “religious” or “Christian” to call upon, reflect upon, or wrestle with the divine as a means towards vertical motivation to cope with the realities of warfare in the field on behalf of, ultimately, Nazi foreign policy. Second, even if the war drained what little religiosity any of these men possessed, it seems apparent that at least some of them still felt compelled to wrestle with doubts, questions, and frustrations regarding some divine other that had, for whatever reason, an immovable indifference to their sufferings in combat. The traumas accrued during the war haunted many of these soldiers even after the guns fell silent in the spring of 1945. The religious discourse found throughout the writings of many within the Wehrmacht speaks to a security that needed to be found in structures that Nazism itself simply could not lift up on its own. And yet, those seemingly benign structures of religion offered the clarity necessary to wage Hitler’s war of ideological annihilation.

Kurt Elfert enjoyed playing chess with his grandnephew. To the historian Felix Römer, he was the “grandfather I’d never had.” Elfert also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. As a veteran of the Wehrmacht and a survivor of the invasion of the Soviet Union, questions were inevitably asked, and stories demanded of him. Mere words, however, could rip apart Elfert’s social composure like glass smashed on concrete. Any mention of Russia, or the very word itself, could bring the man into a fit of uncontrollable trembling and sobbing. Elfert never shared his war stories, and the terror he felt then was just as aggressive as the terror he felt in the woods and fields of the Soviet Union.[39] For so many others who had a similar experience, they needed to keep them in the fight. Something needed to smother emotional vulnerability for the sake of a demanding job. Oftentimes, it was religion.

Notes

[1]  For more on the Wehrmacht chaplaincy, see Doris L. Bergen, Between God and Hitler: Military Chaplains in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

[2] Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hitler’s Wehrmacht: 1935-1945, translated by Janice W. Ancker (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 35; Müller, Hitler’s Wehrmacht, 44.

[3] Ibid., 44-47; Ibid., 47-48.

[4] David Harrisville, The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021), 15-16.

[5] Harrisville, Virtuous Wehrmacht 16.

[6] Ibid., 16-17.

[7] Ibid.

[8]  Bryce Sait, The Indoctrination of the Wehrmacht: Nazi Ideology and the War Crimes of the German Military (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 6, 130-135; Felix Römer, Comrades: The Wehrmacht from Within, translated by Alex J. Kay (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 8.

[9] Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (London: Vintage, 2015), 166; Stargardt, The German War, 166; Ibid., 166-167; Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 711; Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, translated by Deboran Lucas Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 173-174.

[10] David Harrisville, “Unholy Crusaders: The Wehrmacht and the Reestablishment of Soviet Churches during Operation Barbarossa.” Central European History 52 (2019): 623, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938919000876.

[11] Karel Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine During Nazi Rule (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2004), 242-243, 252.

[12] Harrisville, “Unholy Crusaders,” 623, 628, 644-645, 647; Harrisville, Virtuous Wehrmacht, 105.

[13] The Richard Lester Collection (RLC), McCain Library & Archives, PFC Gerhard Richter to Oskar Richter Ofensetzmeister, Neustadt in Saxony Sebinitzerstr, 4 May 29, 1941, The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS. Traditionally, Whitsun is a celebration of Pentecost, an event recorded in The Acts of the Apostles and understood to be the inception of the Christian Church. The celebration falls upon the seventh Sunday after Easter.

[14] ; Sgt. Hans Oehler, 3rd Panzer Grenadier Regiment, to Richard Oehler Rӧdlitz, Glogau Saxony, Hindenburgstr 69b, 13 June, 1943, RLC.

[15] Christian Caspar, Infantry Regiment 739, 3 July 1942, RLC.

[16]  Dirk Chervatin, ed., Eastern Front: 500 Letters from War (Duisburg: EK-2 Publishing, 2022), 4; Chervatin, Eastern Front, 4-5; Ibid., 83.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid., 92.

[20] Gina Hirsche, Vienna IX, Hӧfergasse 18/12 to Hedwig Prott, Office of the Governor General, Krakow 20, State Secretary, 1 December, 1941, RLC.

[21]  Harrisville, Virtuous Wehrmacht, 110-111; Erich Wimmer, Vienna 114, Pötzleinsdorfer straße 99/4, to Sgt. Franz Wimmer, Central Spare Parts Depot C/I/34 Koblenz-Lützel, 20 March, 1940, RLC; Pvt. Karl Gӧbel, 3rd Rifle Battalion 14th Regiment, Nordlager Prag, Block 8 to Mrs. Hilde Gӧbel, Zӧblitz Erzgeb, Marienberg 54, 23 October, 1944, RLC; Chervatin, Eastern Front, 54; Ibid., 58-59, 61, 66.

[22] PFC Carl Launinger to Willy Launinger, 1st Artillery Reserve 260, Ludwigsburg K.6. Camp, 26 June, 1941, RLC.

[23] Hans Caspar, 15th Bakery Company, to Johann Caspar, Frankenau, near Frankenberg/Eder Kassel, 22 June 1941, RLC.

[24] Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 116; Bartov, Hitler’s Army, 116.

[25] PFC Kari Walterskirchen to Mrs. Elisabeth Walterskirchen Vienna 1, Singerstr 16, 11 February, 1942, RLC; Georg Tessin, Verbände und Truppen der deutschen Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939-45. Erster Band: Die Waffengattungen - Gesamtübersicht (Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag, 1977), 363.

[26] Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 101.

[27] Gustav Schandler, 815th Panzer Pioneer Battalion to Frau Else Schandler, Minden, Westfalen, Hufschmiede 3, 26 December 1944, RLC.

[28] Martha Lötzsch, Venusberg Spinneret, Erzgebirge, to Erich Lötzsch, 2nd Company, 192nd Grenadier Battalion, 7 July, 1944, RLC; Martha Lötzsch, Venusberg Spinneret, Erzgebirge, to Erich Lötzsch Sa, Aus b. Abteilung 4 Eilenburg, Mulde, 6 September, 1943, RLC; Csala Family, Wien Mӧdling Fürstenstr 12 to Pvt. Gottfried Csala,12 January, 1943, RLC; Mrs. F. Hannoever, Nateln-Ülzen, to PFC Friedrich Hannoever, Field Police Battalion 510, 29 January, RLC; Mrs. Hannoever, Nateln-Ülzen, to PFC Friedrich Hannoever, Field Police Battalion 510, 7 January, 1944, RLC.

[29] Samuel W. Witcham, Jr., Hitler’s Legions: The German Army Order of Battle, World War II (Briarcliff Manor: Stein & Day, 1985), 73; Hans Danner, Wartberg Kreis Ennz to Sgt. Franz Brunner, 45th Infantry Division,17 March, 1942, RLC; Kuezner Family, Heimbach-Nahe to Sgt. Emil Kuezner, 18th Artillery Regiment, 25 June 1944, RLC; Ibid; Harrisville, Virtuous Wehrmacht, 53.

[30] Kurt to Holde, In the East, 21 November 1944, RLC.

[31] PFC Christian Caspar, Infantry Regiment 739, to Johannes Caspar, Frankenau- Kassel, Walwerkerstr 26, 22 July, 1941, RLC; Fritz, Frontsoldaten, 62; Ibid., 40.

[32] Stargardt, The German War, 166-167. See also, Harrisville, Virtuous Wehrmacht, 127.

[33] Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier: War on the Russian Front, a True Story, translated by Harper & Row Publishers Inc. (London: Orion Books Ltd., 1999), 118, 121-122.

[34] Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier, 209, 239.

[35] For more on the debates surrounding the Großdeutschland Division’s part in wartime atrocities, see Raffael Scheck’s Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

[36] Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier, 271-272.

[37] Ibid., 369.

[38] Ibid., 483.

[39] Römer, Comrades, 1.